Ugh, I keep meaning to start an lj post and then just drifting off to something else. Oops?

I have a summer class--Lit in English II--at the moment. It's one I'm retaking, due to previous fail, and oh my god this professor. He's an older gentleman, for one, and so he seems to be more New Criticism oriented (New Criticism is the boring way to read things), which kind of sucks. We've spent a lot of time on philosophy stuff, because he tends to go on and on and on talking about stuff that I'm fairly certain could easily be summed up in 15 to 30 minutes. Arrgh, I don't need a ton of examples, just tell me the basics. I'm really appreciating the woman I had the first time I tried to take the course, since she was concise and generally interesting, even if I did have to hear a lot about Wordsworth maybe banging his sister. Dammit, I wish I could've gotten this done the first time around.

Then I'm sort of depressed at the moment just because I'm doing so little beyond that class. I've had so little energy, and that sucks a lot and drives me up the wall. Plus I've half-heartedly tried getting in touch with people, but the problem is that neither I nor any of my friends are good at coming up with things to do, so we tend to just waffle around for ages and not get shit done and then eventually give up and see a movie. :( I am not good at being social. Also, there's not much to do here.

Oh, and I got a new car!

The old car. I called her Squeaky, after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme:

The new car. I'm calling it The Yellow Dart, even though it's more of a champagne color:

The brakes are already failing! It doesn't even have a real license plate, yet! How lucky am I? :( lol $2500 used car.

That's good to hear about Saturns; no one in my family has owned one before. This one is from 1993 and I'm still getting used to it and figuring out what's wrong with it. So far it was all negligible stuff, little annoyances, but then yesterday the brakes abruptly gave out. It actually felt pretty similar to something that happened on my last car, and fixing that wasn't too expensive, so I'm hoping this is similar. :/

Why is New Criticism boring? I always find it so tedious when people go on and on about the author and how, because he was gay, this scene most definitely means blabla and here you can see his childhood trauma over having been made to wear girl's dresses by his mother etc. I prefer to stick with the text because this is the one clear thing we have. But each to their own! Which school do you prefer?

I hear you about being depressed about not doing anything but school. I don't even know anymore what it was like to just sit on the couch and not think about stuff you still need to do and feeling guilty about not doing them x.x.

Don't get me wrong; I think close-reading and drawing on the text are important. I just find it so limiting to draw only on the text, especially since the way I was taught to do it, you were supposed to pick out instances of opposition (love vs. hate, heaven vs. hell, finite vs. infinite) and then show how the poet came to a resolution. After a while that just gets super tedious. I'm more fond of historical criticism, queer and feminist theory, and some post-colonial and biographical stuff. Not so much psychological criticism. I'm really big on historical context though. Oddly, I feel far more like I'm making up bullshit if I'd just trying to draw on the text. It gets to be so circular.

But yeah, I'm glad this particular class is finally over. It was probably good for me, but oh man was it ever a lot of writing on some metaphysical Victorian philosophy.

And that car may look swanky in the picture, but what's hidden is the crack on the windshield and the missing hubcaps, and the scrapes on the bumper... it photographs well, hah.